Was reading this last night; a really interesting short story about the creation of a fictional world, through the rigorous production of a detailed encyclopaedia of it. The discovery of that encyclopaedia ultimately leads to the history and reality of the narrator's world being usurped in favour of the more clearly structured Tlon - the fiction becoming reality.
This explores typical Borges ideas of stories within stories and worlds within worlds, and as with much of his work, has significant architectural implications. Especially, in the context of student or paper architecture.
My dissertation looked at the fictional world of the drawing being 'real' through its evocative power to draw eople into its world, often through lack of clarity. Borges seems to suggest the other, that a project with enough detail could actually overtake reality. It's an idea that reminds me of Lawrence Miles' bottle universes.
It also strikes me that the possibilities of digital technology could ultimately lead to this kind of mass acceptance of an alternative reality as truth being a tangible possibility - the spread of fallacious online rumours of celebrity deaths being accepted as facts is perhaps a parallel example; the scale of the Encyclopaedia of Tlon being the only real difference.
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